Mathew Innman of seomoz.org fame wrote about how Digg could increase their revenue by using a so called canonical URL for their whole site. This can be implemented by redirecting users that type in, for example, www.digg.com to digg.com. The reasoning being that instead of having backlinks pointing to two different domains (www and no-www), all backlinks should point to just one, which increases your search engine ranking.

This is currently my favorite image replacement technique. I don't remember where I found it... Using it can improve both your site's usability and your search engine ranking, by allowing both screen readers and search engines to find your h1 headlines. First create the h1 and the description of your page/site, for example:

Remember to update the default description and keywords in the meta tags' body.

Now, whenever you publish an article, simply add an excerpt and some tags to it. The excerpt is used as the meta description and the article's tags as the meta keywords, both make Google a bit happier, but the description is by far the more important.

My idea for achieving optimal content crawlability and SEO optimized URLs is to use permalinks instead of ids and the default Rails routes. The permalinks can contain whatever you decide is optimal from a SEO point of view.

As an example, let's take a recipe site that has a recipe at http://xxx/recipes/asia/china/beijing-duck.html.

First let's configure the .html extension to be handled by the RecipesController: